


Symbiosis

by thegalwhodidlikemusicals



Category: The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals - Team StarKid
Genre: Emma tries to be a good student, Gen, Hidgens is a good professor, Hopefully tasteful fluff?, Swearing, yep it's the groceries story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 09:08:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18891517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegalwhodidlikemusicals/pseuds/thegalwhodidlikemusicals
Summary: Damned if going to office hours didn’t make her feel like a goody two-shoes, not to mention like a fucking child. But she didn’t have much choice, she resolved as passed through the front door of the science center. There was no excuse for missing the first day of class. So, like a good student, Emma had looked online and found that her professor (Higgens? No, Hidgens, she could never remember) had office hours Wednesday afternoon. And she was on her way to kiss his ass now, or beg for forgiveness, and hopefully not fall behind before she had even started.The beginning of an awkward yet pleasant friendship, i.e. the groceries story!





	Symbiosis

Of course Emma had to get a migraine on the first day of Microbiology. Tuesday evening, when she was supposed to be getting started on her most dreaded credit towards her botany degree, she had instead been in bed, trying not to puke her guts out. That was the life of Emma Perkins: giving her just enough hope that things were going okay until it sucker-punched her in the gut.

Damned if going to _office hours_ didn’t make her feel like a goody two-shoes, not to mention like a fucking _child_. But she didn’t have much choice, she resolved as passed through the front door of the science center. There was no excuse for missing the first day of class. So, like a good student, Emma had looked online and found that her professor (Higgens? No, Hidgens, she could never remember) had office hours Wednesday afternoon. And she was on her way to kiss his ass now, or beg for forgiveness, and hopefully not fall behind before she had even started.

Emma had never explored the science complex, and she hoped she would never have to again. It was honestly pretty depressing, with gray cinderblock walls and corridors that all looked the same. She had the office number S227 written down, but she managed to complete a circuit of what she _thought_ was the entire second floor without finding it. After a few more wrong turns, she stopped a blonde woman pushing a cart of laptops.

“Do you know how to find Professor Hidgens’s office?”

The woman gave a small sigh. “Just listen for the one with weird noises coming from it.”

Emma furrowed her brow.

“Sorry. Yeah, of course,” the woman continued. She shook her head as if to re-ground herself and pointed behind Emma to a small hallway. “Make two lefts back there and go past the janitor’s closet. You won’t miss it—he asked to be far away from everyone, so he’s the only one who has his office separated from the rest of the bio professors.”

“That’s a little strange,” Emma remarked.

“I’d use a stronger word, but that would be unprofessional of me,” the other woman said. She gave a thin smile. “I’m Professor Sellers, also in biology.  Good luck finding Hidgens, and if you do…don’t judge the whole department based on him. A lot of us are really sociable, I swear.”

They said their goodbyes and Emma took off in the direction the woman had indicated. She hadn’t been particularly nervous about meeting him, but Professor Sellers’s words left a slight squeeze of anxiety in her abdomen. Just as Sellers had predicted, she did hear something as she rounded the second corner. There was a low thrumming sound coming from the door past the janitor’s office, as well as some metallic clanging. Good God.

Emma raised her fist to knock—

The door swung open and Emma felt a finger press against her lips, shushing her. The man behind the door was braced and quite still, with his eyes fixed on his desk. Resting on it was a fish tank with a small camera and stereo trained on it. The low pulses she has been hearing from outside the door were the deep bass of an electronic music track directed at the tank. The fish were scattering wildly at every beat.

Emma was fucking concerned, to say the least. As she stood, the professor took his other hand, the one not shushing her, and clenched and unfurled it several times. She tried to interpret it—maybe he was telling her to leave?—but as she backed up, he clicked his tongue and moved his hand from her mouth to her shoulder, holding her in place.

She had to call on every ounce of restraint not to flip the fuck out because of being touched by someone she had never met, but Emma resolved to at least wait in silence until something happened, one way or another. The office’s cluttered but homey atmosphere stood in contrast to Hidgens, who appeared to be the prototypical professor in his blazer and turtleneck. Large stacks of books surrounded them, along with a few puzzles and a Rubik’s cube. A row of healthy plants lined the window, their vines crawling down to rest on the book stacks. But as Emma looked more, she noticed a few objects that seemed out of place in an office. She spotted about fifteen rolls of duct tape and…was that _actually_ a bulletproof vest? She couldn’t say for sure, having only seen them on TV, but it was at least a really good fake.

After maybe half a minute, the song faded out. The professor dropped his hand from her shoulder and sighed.

“Many thanks for your patience,” he intoned. “Any speaking could have compromised the trial.”

She relaxed slightly. “No problem…I thought you were trying to make me go away with your hands?”

“Absolutely not!” The professor narrowed his eyes. “I was communicating that the song only had 25 seconds remaining.”

“Yeah, that _super_ wasn’t clear.”

“Oh.” His eyes darted around for a moment—he was clearly embarrassed. “My apologies.”

Emma cleared her throat and gestured at the weird fish set-up. “Um, this was a trial of _what_ , exactly?”

Any of his momentary discomfort passed, as the professor moved toward his experiment and shut off the speaker in one fluid movement. “I’m studying the swimming patterns of these zebrafish in response to different types of intense auditory stimuli! Some families which have been bred into captivity for biological study have lost their natural response of skewed swimming patterns, but no one has successfully answered why…”

“You’re…scaring fish with music?”

“ _Precisely!_ ”

“I’m sorry, I’m just kind of wondering…why would anyone want to do that?”

Professor Hidgens locked eyes with Emma with an odd intensity. “Because we understand only a tiny fraction of the world we live in, and this is a question we can ask and maybe…even…answer?”

Fucking good enough for her, Emma thought. “Yeah…I guess so.”

The professor shrugged. “Of course this isn’t the real lab set-up. I’m just testing with a small sample, and more…diverse noise options than might be taken seriously by my colleagues. They seemed to strongly dislike _Carmen_. I do admit I am surprised.”

“Your colleagues?”

“The fish. Although no accounting for my colleagues’ tastes, either.”

Emma opened her mouth to respond, and then she closed it, settling for a nod.

“Now, what is it you wanted?” Professor Hidgens asked, beginning to pack up the video camera and mount.

“Oh, it’s just, I missed class yesterday because of a stupid migraine, and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t, you know, already behind on everything.”

The professor harrumphed. “The first day of class is filled with administrivia that neither I nor my students care to discuss. And any content was surely covered in your previous biology coursework.”

“I’m actually not a biology major, Professor. I’m a botany major? I’m using this to fill my Cellular Structures requirement...”

“Yes, yes,” said Hidgens, impatiently waving his hand, and Emma vaguely worried he would drop the tripod. “Well, you probably even saw the material in high school.”

“Oh, I don’t remember shit from high school. I’m not even a science person, I just would really like to start a—”

Emma shut her mouth, immediately nervous about the swearing in the office of some old white man she didn’t even know, and almost convincing her professor she was a loser stoner, and of course she was getting off on the wrong foot _already—_

“What’s a science person?”

“I—sorry?”

Professor Hidgens set down the camera and regarded her. “What’s a science person?”

“I don’t know…someone who can do calculations quickly?”

The professor scoffed. “Mathematics. Horrid. I ran away from that awful shit as soon as I could. Biology is much more than calculations.” Emma shifted, slightly uncomfortable under his stare. “To me, biology is…creation. Do you create things?”

This conversation was more than Emma had bargained for. She laughed, but it was tinged with nerves. “Not really. I mean, I’m crap at art. Except I have been practicing those designs on top of lattes. I’m getting pretty good at the ferns.”

“Marvelous!”  Emma searched for a hint of sarcasm, but found none—the old man seemed sincere in his awe. She caught a hint of a smile on his face as he stood. “Latte art is truly a highlight of 21st century culture. In any case, I hope you’ll find that our class together is more than symbol-pushing and textbook-absorption.” He reached below his desk and pulled out a couple of stapled pages. “Here are the notes from Tuesday, although we only just began to fill them in. You won’t be too behind tomorrow.”

Emma took them and stuffed them into her backpack. “Well, thanks, Professor. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“You’re welcome, Emma.”

She stopped. “You—you know who I am?”

Professor Hidgens turned back to his fish tank, managing a small shrug with the air of trying hard to seem nonchalant. “Of course. I learn all my students’ names, and I remembered that Emma was out yesterday.” He traced his fingers along the edge of the tank, and Emma could feel she was being dismissed as abruptly as she had been invited in. She excused herself and hurried back outside, allowing herself to bask only a little in the warm feeling that someone had cared enough to learn her name.

Later that evening, Emma would start to read the outline, just to snicker at the title:

_Living Beings Are Remarkable and Unintuitive and Maybe Even a Little Bit…Horrifying._

_Let’s Study Them!_

If you’d asked Emma what her favorite class would be just a week ago, no way in hell would she have picked Microbiology. But she could tell that she was, at the very least, in for an interesting ride.

**Author's Note:**

> Wow hi friends! It's been about six years since I've written fic--tgwdlm brought me back :)
> 
> I wanted to write this because as crazy as Hidgens may be, this lines in the show indicate to me that he would be a really supportive teacher. At the same time it would take a lot of awkward interactions between Emma and Hidgens before they'd be cool with each other. And if anyone cares, the fish experiment described is based on one my friend is doing for his thesis! Science is cool.
> 
> I have parts two and three in mind for this, if y'all are interested! Comments are much appreciated, and of course, I don't own anything! (Lastly you can follow me on tumblr at the same username thegalwhodidlikemusicals, I'm v new there and would love friends!!!)


End file.
